Hop It! Tips and Strategies

Basic strategy

No matter which mode you choose, the object of the game is to survive as long as possible, and achieve the highest score. You always start with a certain number of lives; in Simple or Challenge mode, you can gain an additional life by filling up the Hop-o-Meter and advancing to the next level. In Puzzle mode, you can't win extra lives, but if you run out, you can select Continue to reset your score to zero and your lives to 10.

When playing Simple or Challenge, you lose one life for each bomb that remains on the screen at the end of a round. This makes bomb removal your top priority! Some of them may appear in very tricky locations, such as corners, and will need to be moved out before you can hop over them. Work out how you plan to remove all the bombs before you even move your first piece! Better still, prevent them from appearing in the first place: the fewer pieces you have left at the end of a round, the fewer bombs you'll have to deal with in the next round.

Leftover bombs also count as pieces, even though they explode at the end of a round. So if you leave three pieces and two bombs, that counts as five pieces.

In Puzzle mode, of course, every board can be solved down to one piece. In Simple or Challenge mode, some boards can be reduced to a single piece (the first board of every level can always be solved!), but others can't. You should always try to leave as few pieces as possible, though. Not only does this reduce the chance of bombs, but it increases the likelihood of bonus gems! Gems are worth extra points, but they'll only appear if you have three or less pieces left at the end of a round.

Look for common, easily solvable patterns. For instance, the two layouts below can be solved every time!

Advanced strategy

Extra pieces aren’t always a bad thing! For instance, if you can’t remove enough pieces in a round to prevent bombs from appearing in the next round, leaving as many pieces as possible can help keep the bombs from popping up somewhere isolated and tricky. Also, the more pieces you have on the board at the start of a round, the easier it is to set up a really long chain of hops. Remember: the more pieces you can hop over sequentially, the more each of them will be worth! The longest possible chain is ten hops.

At the beginning of a round, the new pieces are based on the position of leftover pieces from the previous round. Each remaining piece will “pop” into as many as four new pieces, either in an X or + pattern, leaving the original spot empty. If no moves are available after the new pieces appear, they will “pop” again. Leftover pieces on the edges and corners of the board will produce less new pieces than leftovers in the center of the board.

Always plan ahead! Solve as much of the board as you can in your head; then move the pieces. You can’t undo a move once you’ve made it, so make sure that every move will count. If there are lots of pieces on the board, bring as many as you can to the center area, then look and plan again. Learn to recognize not only the solvable patterns, but the dangerously unsolvable ones as well. And remember, in this game, symmetry is rarely your friend!

The more levels you play in Puzzle mode, the more pieces will appear at the start of each level. Never be too hasty to make that first move; the keys to victory are careful planning and patience!

Gem bonus awards

Hop over a gem to score bonus points. Remember, gems can be used just like regular pieces, so you can use one gem to hop over another one!

To make gems appear:Three pieces left at the end of a round = 25% of the pieces in the next round will be gems.Two pieces left at the end of a round = 50% of the pieces in the next round will be gems.One piece left at the end of a round = ALL of the pieces in the next round will be gems!

One last note! Is the game running slowly on your computer? Just select the middle button in the lower right corner of the game screen to toggle the animations off.

NEW! Tips from the game designers!We called in the Hop It! game designers to provide us with some insider tips for Hop It success. Here are some of their suggestions:

Use the arrow keys to speed up your game. Click the piece that you want to move, then use the arrow keys to direct it.

Don’t worry about solving every board down to one piece (some boards just can’t be solved). Instead, try to reduce the boards to fewer pieces, paying special attention to bombs.

As you have probably noticed, you get more pieces each time you run out of moves. What you might not have noticed is that the fewer pieces you leave the more gems you get!

To reduce the pieces, without solving the puzzle ahead of time, first try to bring pieces away from the edges and into the center. This will help you reduce the pieces on this round, as well as creating fewer stranded pieces on the next round. (Stranded pieces are those familiar pieces at the edges that you can’t jump, no matter what you do!)

When you leave a lot of pieces behind, you tend to get more bombs. However, if you leave a huge number of pieces behind, this isn’t so bad, because fewer of those pieces will be stranded. That’s why it’s better to leave several pieces in one area, instead of just one. Experiment to see what happens when you leave the board as full as you can!

Try to see which pieces are “in phase” with each other. Like the red and black squares of a checkerboard, pieces that are next to each other (like red touching black) are out of phase, and can jump each other. Pieces that are connected diagonally (like any two red spaces) are “in phase” and can’t jump each other. If all your pieces are “in phase,” you’ve run out of moves, so pay special attention to keeping pieces of both phases alive as long as you can.

Long jumps can earn you point bonuses, so if you can make a long jump with a single piece, you shouldn’t break it up by making jumps with other pieces. Also, look for opportunities to set up extra-long jumps. The longest jump you can possibly make is 10 steps long!

In puzzle mode, every level is solvable. You have to get the board down to one piece to move on. This mode is for serious thinkers! But in the other modes, you’re just trying to get down to the fewest number of pieces that you can, and avoid leaving too many bombs behind.